“Staging a home is more important in a slower market. You’re competing with more properties, and if your home doesn’t present well in the photos, people will click right by,” said Adrian Hunnings, president of the Greater Capital Area Association of Realtors.
Stagers can consult with a homeowner for two or three hours and offer a written report for about $150 to $375, allowing homeowners to make the recommended improvements themselves. For homes that require more work, the stager can do more of the heavy lifting by bringing in rugs, hanging art, repainting walls and fixing up landscaping. Those services can cost up to a couple of thousand dollars per month.
Because of the added expense, lawyer Raquel Rodriguez said she was initially hesitant to hire a staging professional to help sell her Adams Morgan condominium last year. But with a tenant living in her condo, no buyers materialized for two months. Once the tenant moved out, Rodriguez’s agent, Mary Lowry Smith of Coldwell Banker, picked up about a quarter of the $2,000 staging and furniture rental fee to make the home “warm and memorable and give prospective buyers a vision for my open floor plan. I appreciated it right away when she explained the concept,” Rodriguez said.
With several other properties for sale in the building and the neighborhood, Rodriguez had incentive to show her 1,250-square-foot unit at its best. She got two offers and sold 34 days after staging her home for the list price of $465,000. “It sold faster than it otherwise would have and faster than other properties at the time,” she said. “Staging it made the difference.”
According to the HomeGain 2011 Home Improvement National Survey of real estate agents, even do-it-yourself staging — on which Washingtonians spent an average of $350 last year — can bring a $1,500 to $2,000 payback in the sales price.
But there can be drawbacks, too. D.C. broker Bill Sawyer said there is such a thing as too much staging: A seller spent $16,000 on staging every room elaborately, but the home did not sell. The seller gave up, removed the furniture and decor, and sold the place two weeks later, empty.
Basic staging “brings some emotion back to the process, which helps bump the price up,” said Sawyer, of William Sawyer & Co. Realtors. “No need to go overboard with table settings.”
We asked local real estate agents and staging professionals to share tips and tactics to improve certain kinds of properties that have the most need for staging.
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